The Trump administration on Friday ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI technology and imposed other major penalties, culminating an unusually public clash between the government and the company over AI safeguards.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a move that could prevent U.S. military vendors from working with the company.

Hegseth’s remarks, delivered in a social media post, came shortly after the Pentagon’s deadline for Anthropic to allow unrestricted military use of its AI technology or face consequences — and nearly 24 hours after CEO Dario Amodei said his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Defense Department’s demands.

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[–] 4 points 8 months ago

The supply chain risk designation and threats of imprisonment are completely insane. It's effectively the corporate death penalty for Anthropic. I expect the stock market would be crashing right now if it were open.

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    [–] 25 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Looks like the Friday deadline was set, because they needed anthropic for the attack?

    Am I missing something? How would LLM be useful for operations like this?

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago*

    Plausible deniability. For example, if Anthropic caved, today's murder of 50 Iranian kids would probably be blamed on the AI fucking up. It would give them a scapegoat.

    It's a mix of that and these people genuinely believing this garbage is actually remotely useful.

    Fuck Anthropic and all AI companies, but at the same time good on them for not bending the knee here.

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  • [–] [S] 10 points 8 months ago

    OpenAI's Sam Altman says today that they're gonna take Anthropic's place on DoW classified networks (https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175#m).

    Still, Anthropic being designated a "supply chain risk" is good news, as it means Claude cannot officially be used anymore by the Pentagon and by all of its suppliers. That's massive.

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  • [–] 27 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I caution against the enthusiasm here. As I understand it, the complaint wasn't that Anthropic didn't want to make autonomous weapons so much as that they wanted to retain control over the systems once they were sold to the government.

    No reasonable government should allow corporate control over their military assets, and frankly, I trust Anthropic with control over weapons even less than I trust the Trump administration.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 8 months ago

    Good discussion of this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188473

    I haven't read anyone say that it was about retaining the IP. Anthropic says, and others agree, that it would be totally irresponsible to use current frontier AI systems for lethal autonomous weapon systems -- even if you think that LAWS are okay. Current AI systems are far too error-prone.

    See https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war and https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-war

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